January 1, 2007, Business as usual: New Year's Day edition
One of the most disconcerting trends in journalism, a trend so troubling that it threatens the continued viability of our republic (and certainly any pretensions it has to being a democratic republic) is the reprinting of Karl Rove's faxed press releases on the front page of the New York Times, and the presentation to us as if this were actually "news". A classic case appears today, and bears the Orwellian title "Rush to Hang Saddam Hussein was Questioned". Well, that's certainly true: I questioned it. Hell, go down our sidebar, and you'll find that most of Left Blogistan (and a good deal of Center Blogistan and some part of Right Blogistan) questioned it... even some of the most (otherwise) bloodthirsty commenters questioned whether it would not have been better, for example, to at least conclude the current genocide trial now proceeding before executing Hussein, just to make him face up to the full scope of his crimes while he was still alive. So yeah... there was questioning of the rush to hangin'...
But the Times piece pretends that it was "American officials" that were seriously questioning it... that somehow that all powerful Iraqi PM Maliki overruled cooler, wiser American heads concerned about executing Saddam on Eid-al-Adha, concerned about perception among Sunni Iraqis, concerned with not completing the current trial and so forth.
Plllllllllease.
Bullshit's not hard to call on this one: Saddam was in American custody until immediately before the hanging (and that hanging took place in the American protected Green Zone.) The United States government was at all times in a position to order its military to simply refuse to hand over Saddam until "its concerns" were addressed. Period. The last word. Hence, even if one is willing to suspend disbelief and pretend that the timing of the execution (along with the timing of the trial, including the announced verdict and sentence immediately before the mid-term elections) were calculated by someone other than Karl Rove for whatever political purposes he deemed appropriate, we could still have pulled rank on Maliki (and not vice versa) and refused to hand him over pending any condition we set; as our ward and protectee, Maliki is hardly in a position to challenge us on that... surely, the Mahdi Army is not yet ready for prime time if that involves taking on the entire United States military. (Indeed, the early part of the article discusses Saddam's body being carried to Tikrit on an American military helicopter... but then we're told to believe that this was all the Iraqis' doing!)
The Grey Lady/Karl Rove then expects us to believe tripe like the following was orchestrated by anyone other than Karl Rove, and that if there was a "conflict", it was between locally based Americans and their Iraqi counterparts as opposed to between they and their 1600-based overlords:
American officials in Iraq have been reluctant to say much publicly about the pell-mell nature of the hanging, apparently fearful of provoking recriminations in Washington, where the Bush administration adopted a hands-off posture, saying the timing of the execution was Iraq’s to decide.While privately incensed at the dead-of-night rush to the gallows, the Americans here have been caught in the double bind that has ensnared them over much else about the Maliki government — frustrated at what they call the government’s failure to recognize its destructive behavior, but reluctant to speak out, or sometimes to act, for fear of undermining Mr. Maliki and worsening the situation.
But a narrative assembled from accounts by various American officials, and by Iraqis present at some of the crucial meetings between the two sides, shows that it was the Americans who counseled caution in the way the Iraqis carried out the hanging. The issues uppermost in the Americans’ minds, these officials said, were a provision in Iraq’s new Constitution that required the three-man presidency council to approve hangings, and a stipulation in a longstanding Iraqi law that no executions can be carried out during the Id al-Adha holiday, which began for Iraqi Sunnis on Saturday and Shiites on Sunday.
I suppose someone will still believe this; polls show that there are still people who support Bush's handling of Iraq and job performance... they won't be deterred merely by the facts or by reality...
But regular readers here do know better. They know what's coming: the increased violence which will be sold as a reason for "the surge" because of the misguided call by Maliki and the Iraqis over our sounder objections to execute Saddam now.
Just unbelievable. The Times, which the right-wing has not hesitated to call traitorous when the Times does its job and objectively reports things (like the various warrantless search programs, or key aspects of the detentions policy and other things the Government would not tell us on its own), alas, the Times nonetheless falls back to its irritating doctrinal laziness and uncritically accepts the tripe faxed to it from the White House and RNC.
Ladies and gentlemen of the Fourth Estate... you're not getting a seat at the tough guys' table. You're just not. So please give up that fantasy and do your damned jobs.
Update: Iraqi blogger Riverbend (via A Brooklyn Bridge) calls this American-staged grim theater "a lynching", and disabuses us of a good deal of shoddy reporting from other sources.
[Congratulations are in order to the Bush Administration for its overall handling of this. It takes special skill to turn the execution of one of the most brutal tyrants of our time into an occasion for allowing pretensions of his martyrdom.]
Further Update: This from Pakistan's Dawn suggests that the helicopter transport of Saddam Hussein's body was personally approved by President George W. Bush.
Comments
Is there anything this crew can't f*ck up. Sorry, stupid question!
Posted by Ron Beasley at January 2, 2007 12:51 AM